Hello from a basement apartment Airbnb in Vancouver. This is my first time visiting Vancouver and most of my research meetings fell through, so please send recommendations of things to do and places to sit and read. (I have already been told, repeatedly, about Stanley Park.)
Having a very multi-modal transit experience on this trip: flew to Seattle, took a ferry to Victoria, took a bus and ferry to Vancouver, and in a couple of days getting on an Amtrak to Portland. Here’s a picture of Galiano Island I took from the to-Vancouver ferry.
Flaubert is free of trousers, natural for a frog, but to those familiar with his genealogy, he risks seeming untowardly nude.
"To Understand Bryant Park, You Must Wrestle With Its Large Frog", Sam Fentress for Hell Gate
While their accountability journalism and calling out of the mayor is obviously also great, this kind of story is one of the biggest reasons I’ll always be ride or die for Hell Gate. A decade ago there were maybe three outlets that might have been willing to accept this freelance pitch (Gothamist pre-WNYC, the Village Voice, Animal New York) or maybe Jim O’Grady would have done a little radio story about it for WNYC. In more halcyon days, maybe even the Metro section of the New York Times might have seen the appeal and today NYT barely even has a Metro section. Thanks Sam Fentress for going so far down this rabbit (or frog as the case may be) hole, thanks Hell Gate for existing.
You can't hear the rustle of corn leaves in a box of Fruit Loops.
Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Submitted by Kira.
the vagina has very little use in sport
Out of context meme-ing of Megan McArdle’s deranged post about gender and sports
I wasn’t sure if I should include this—one, McArdle’s post is pretty awful and the above sentence is actually a concluding point in a longer, even dumber sentence. I encountered it as a separate phrase in people talking shit about the original post. It’s fun to imagine the other contexts where such a sentence could be uttered—”the vagina has very little use in sport—until now”, for instance. How disappointing that its original context is so dumb!
Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font.
The Ministry of Time, Kailane Bradley
Submitted by Marc.
Very few things exist that haven’t, at some point, injured a baseball player.
“The Doctor Tom Brady and Leonardo DiCaprio Call When They Get Hurt”, Zach Helfand for The New Yorker
Submitted by Ranjit.
Will the frontier rock the center, revealing global capitalism in its dirty underwear?
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
The most surreal moment came as I noticed the faint sounds of my daughter and her puppy watching Bluey together down the hall, right as a subscriber was waxing poetic about how much he wanted to eat a macaron from between my ass cheeks; the juxtaposition made me question the entire course of my life.
“I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty”, Brendan I. Koerner for Wired
Submitted by D E.
In this way, words became a fictional record, plagued with euphemisms that veiled reality instead of revealing it.
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (translated by Molly Geidel)
It feels like editing static.
“Fog of bafflegab”, Rob Horning’s newsletter Internal exile
Submitted by Charlie.
The result of that work is a chunky slurry of gossip and fantasy and rank bigotry blasting from a thousand gilded hydrants at every hour of the day; it amounts to a grim sort of fan service catering to an even grimmer fanbase.
“Men On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown”, David Roth for Defector
Extraordinary use of a semicolon.
Explaining why she sucks will only reveal how much you know about her, which is a victory for someone who traffics in attention.
“Yes, Kamala IS brat”, Gita Jackson for Aftermath
Submitted by James. I would also put in a nomination for this one: